From Kevin Drum on the Speaker's reaction to Goldman Sachs' (notorious liberals they) report that the House spending cuts could reduce U.S. GDP by up to 2%."Boehner sure seems to [...]

Just ask the White House Budget Director, Jack Lew. He points out in his USA Today Op-Ed,"Social Security benefits are entirely self-financing. They are paid for with payroll taxes collected [...]

Courtesy of Kevin Drum."Republicans, it turns out, actually spend a bit more money on social programs than Democrats, as the green bars in the chart below show (click for a [...]

On the same topic as the last post:This brings me to the seventh word of my summary of the real fiscal issues: if you’re serious about the deficit, you should [...]

...of how so-called "deficit hawks" are really just "cut taxes for the rich hawks." From E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post -"How do we know our difficulties stem primarily from [...]

Kevin Drum gives the spot on answer for the Republicans.Answer for Republicans: They don't think the deficit is a problem. If they did, they'd favor tax increases, Pentagon cuts, and [...]

According to Matthew Yglesias, it's got to do with how the Republicans favor policies that the rich like. "For “you’re going to have to raise the retirement age for Social [...]

From Kevin Drum at Mother Jones."Social Security costs about 4.5% of GDP. That's going to increase as the baby boomer generation retires, and then in 2030 it steadies out forever [...]

Kevin Drum has been beating this, uh, bongo for a while now. Here's the shorter version, which makes a lot of sense to me:1. The budget deficit is big because [...]

This article calls to mind my view of how Republicans both negotiate and play politics in one little scenario:Republicans: "Compromise? No, either you take our version of the budget or [...]